Andrew Shelley was born in Huddersfield in 1962. He was educated at the University of Cambridge and at Oxford where he held a fellowship and wrote a doctoral dissertation on Samuel Beckett. He has also held scholarships at the universities of Athens, Crete and Istanbul. His articles and literary journalism have appeared in a wide range of publications including Essays in Criticism and The Sunday Times and his poetry in various little magazines and anthologies. He is currently preparing a collection of poems and a prose work. He lives in Oxford.

Shelley’s is an intellectual yet sensuous poetry in which the insisted-upon details of individual experience are held in often rebarbative contact with the increasingly embattled categories of mind that support shared life, common society. Despite this, by virtue of a reasoned intuition that attends as much to the particular contingencies of life ­ at home in work and love ­ as to their wider determinations, there occur moments of great lyrical intensity in which thinking and feeling combine.

Kate Bass was born in East Finchley in North London in 1962. Poems of hers have appeared in magazines; this is her first collection to be published. After graduating in Chemistry from Edinburgh University in the early eighties she worked for the Patent Agency in London. In 1989 Kate Bass moved to Cambridge; since 1993 she has been studying Illustration at Anglia Polytechnic University.

Kate Bass’ poems combine directness with a strong sense of mystery. There is great accomplishment in the apparently calm and ordered balance of her narratives; but always underlying them a haunting sense of otherness. It is writing which can, for instance, introduce the myth of Persephone in a manner which is all the more effective for seeming quite natural and unforced.

The Onion House features a cover illustration by Kate Bass.